Not everyone loves Frank Gehry. The architect’s most recent project is an unenviable task: forming the skyline of Brooklyn. On Friday, with developer Forest City Ratner, Gehry unveiled his model of the borough’s Atlantic Yards Project, a 22-acre plot of glass, brick and metal skyscrapers that would poke up over historic, low-rise neighborhoods, the residents of which aren’t universally happy.
Opponents say he’s painting a gloss over ’60s-style urban renewal and have demanded he alter the density and size of his project. Although the developer has committed to contract the plan by about five percent, Gerhy said Friday that he had been “paring back” the design himself. “It is a process,” he added elusively, according to The New York Times.
This process is a strange one, although you can glimpse it in Sydney Pollack’s new documentary, Sketches of Frank Gehry, which I saw this afternoon.
And begin with a sketch it does, loping and loose, like a drunken scrawl on a cocktail party napkin. Models are next. Gehry can’t or won’t use computers, and instead we see him as the film opens, paunchy, white-haired and plain-spoken, seated at a table with a pair of Fiskars scissors, Scotch tape and sheets of thin, silvery cardboard. He has half a model before him, and he cuts, folds and places panels here and there, moving some, adding others, cutting holes. He contemplates and fiddles some more.
“It’s so stupid looking, it’s great,” he says, suggesting later he’s not fully satisfied unless he’s tweaking something. Touring one of his own creations soon after its completion, he says wryly, “By the time I get to the finished building, I don’t like it.”
Gehry is defined several times as an artist or an artist-architect, with the baggage the name may imply: ego, form over function, a drive to perfection, the creation of beauty.
At an early age, Gehry is praised for his masterful sketches and later takes a ceramics class that foreshadows his architectural career; in his statement for the 1980 edition of “Contemporary Architects,” Gehry writes that he approaches each building
as a sculptural object, a spatial container, a space with light and air, a response to context and appropriateness of feeling and spirit. To this container, this sculpture, the user brings his baggage, his program, and interacts with it to accommodate his needs. If he can’t do that, I’ve failed.
Perhaps his first great project is his own house, a container within a container. Gehry is told the pedestrian Los Angeles bungalow he buys in the late ’70s is haunted, and he decides by “the ghosts of Cubism” as he builds an angular shell completely encompassing the original structure. He pays tribute to artist-contemporaries he admires—Johns and Rauschenberg—by using industrial materials out of context, such as chain link fencing and corrugated sheet steel. A shot of Gehry’s kitchen shows its rear wall is the front of the original house, siding and windows intact. Shaving one morning in an upstairs bathroom, he becomes disgruntled by a lack of natural light and punches a hole in the roof with a hammer to let in the sunlight.
After his alterations are more or less complete, the president of a local real estate firm visits Gehry at the house and is flabbergasted the architect would live there but take comparatively pedestrian commissions. Gehry changes his ways of working to be self-reflective and since then has brought well-monied clients and the public his curves and unusual angles, uncommon materials and most famously, his sprawling, undulating roofs and panels of metal.
A fascinating segment of the film occurs when Gehry discusses the unobvious entwining of art with his work. Pulling from an office wall a color laser print of Hieronymus Bosch’s 500-year-old painting Christ Crowned with Thorns, Gehry shows that the shape, position and contrast of its central characters directly influenced the floor plan of the Jerusalem Museum of Tolerance, Center for Human Dignity, in Israel.
Just as art informs his architecture, Gehry’s high-powered clients describe his buildings in unarchitectural terms. Ex-Disney chief Michael Eisner doesn’t hesitate to compare the roof of a Gehry hockey arena in Los Angeles to breasts, while Barry Diller speaks of panels from a project he commissioned as boat sails. Gehry himself has defined a centerpiece element of his Brooklyn project as a bride’s veils. When Pollack asks him if he thinks of the surfaces of his structures as “painterly,” Gehry disagrees. Pollack proves him wrong with a montage of Gehry surfaces absorbing and reflecting light, sky, earth and water, resembling materials unlike themselves: iridescent fish scales or a copper desert floor at sunset.
Only one detractor gets significant air time and offers the instance of Gehry’s most famous work, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, as an example of architecture overwhelming art. The artist Julian Schnabel, surely having some fun clad in a white terry cloth robe and shades as he sips a brandy and dangles a cigarette from his other hand, counters that if Gehry’s surroundings are said to devour art, maybe that art’s just not good enough.
Praise is lavished thickly in Sketches of Frank Gehry, not much time is devoted to any one project and physical failures of Gehry’s work are completely ignored; there was a well-publicized problem, for instance, with the roof of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, which until it was sanded, blinded people on sunny days and heated adjacent sidewalks to 140°. But the film works well as a talk between two old friends, interspersed with bits of the architect’s history, personality, drive and creative process.